“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is”, said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”

This little spectacle of the absurd from Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland , is perhaps the most demonstrative of the verbally ectropic times that we live in. Never before has the logocentric human civilisation(s) produced so many words, mutating, mixing and distorting languages and grammars, to produce words, so many, so nuanced, so familiar and yet distant, that they mean nothing. And if you were a Shakespearean, you would echo Lear’s declaration that ‘Nothing shall come of Nothing’. It is possible to take words by their collars and mug them, when nobody is looking – disfigure them, torment them, twist and turn them upside down, like victims of a schoolyard bully – till they lose all resemblance to themselves and turn purple in their faces. It is possible to string together innocuous words that make sense, as a unit, in themselves and yet fall apart when they talk to each other, all we have is a cacophonic babble of empty signifiers and unmoored meanings. The only way to navigate through the treacherous surfaces of these words and their worldlessness is to resort to producing dictionaries, thesauruses, glossaries, and when all else fails, new lexicons to accommodate for the thisness and thatness of the verbal big bang we are all a part of.

Here are the audio files from the Unspeakably More weekend at Periferry on the Brahmaputra.
It's only 10 hours and there are 19 files in total.

Enjoy!

http://northeastwestsouth.net/uploads/UnspeakablyMoreDay1a.mp3
http://northeastwestsouth.net/uploads/UnspeakablyMoreDay1b.mp3
http://northeastwestsouth.net/uploads/UnspeakablyMoreDay1c.mp3
http://northeastwestsouth.net/uploads/UnspeakablyMoreDay1d.mp3
http://northeastwestsouth.net/uploads/UnspeakablyMoreDay1e.mp3

The "Shadow Search" launched by n.e.w.s. on 15 October closed yesterday, 22 November. The Call was read by a record number of people (and machines). Five proposals were received for consideration by the reading committee. After some five hours of spirited deliberation, the jury found itself at loggerheads. The deciding vote was cast by the n.e.w.s. collective in favour of "Narcissus Search Engine," submitted by Aharon Amir and Phil Jones.

The jury was immediately struck both by the quality and the heterogeneity of the submissions, and divergent opinions notwithstanding, was unanimous in seeing the experience as a learning process.

n.e.w.s. hopes to work with all the participants in further developing their proposals. Any and all readers are also encouraged to contact the authors of the submissions -- published here under n.e.w.s,' site-wide creative commons license -- to help carry them forward.

Wednesday 25 November, 6-8 pm
University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Bachelard Amphitheatre

On the one-year anniversary of the attribution of the first prize in the Competition of Ideas – organized by Jacques Serrano and the Forum européen de l’essai sur l’art – to the n.e.w.s. collective, for our now upcoming book Arbitrating Attention, a critical discussion of the research to date will be held at the Sorbonne in Paris, co-organized by the Forum européen de l’essai sur l’art and the CERAP.

In the course of researching my end of our upcoming book on shadow practices, I have been grappling with the ethics and politics of trying to detect and draw even modest attention to initiatives that have deliberately sought to impair their coefficient of specific visibility. More on that to come. But I guess the most radical way for an artist to get off – and stay off – artworld radar screens is simply to quit the artworld. To bail, but to do so as an – ultimate – artistic gesture. Berlin-based theorist Alexander Koch has initiated and carried out some fascinating research on this unwritten chapter of contemporary art history – the history and conditions of possibility of what he calls the Kunstausstieg (http://www.kunst-verlassen.de/). Here’s an excerpt from our recent exchange.

At Khoj@1Shanti Road , n.e.w.s. will be discussing the research for their forthcoming book, Arbitrating Attention: reinvesting attention surplus in plausible artworlds that seeks to rethink the social and economic conditions of art.

Some sequences of Unspeakably More, a four-day seminar (workshop/gathering) hosted by n.e.w.s. contributors and Khoj at Periferry (a ferry boat) in Guwahati, India will be LIVE webstreamed here. So keep checking!

Shadow Search

October 15-November 22 2009

Continuing our research on our forthcoming book 'Arbitrating Attention: reinvesting attention surplus in plausible artworlds' that rethinks the social and economic conditions of art and explores alternative models of remuneration, n.e.w.s. will interact with the dynamic entrepreneurial, academic and scientific community CIS in Bangalore. Imagining “new social and economic contexts for art” this open seminar, brainstorming session and prize-awarding event brings together interested students, professionals and motivated institutions in working to solve the following conundrum:

Shadow Search

Seminar on the Brahmaputra and and online forum

Participants: Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Monica Narula, Kaushik Bhaumik, Sanjay Bangar, Sharmila Samant, Siu King Chung, Nancy Adajania, Tushar Joag, Howard Chan, Nishant Shah, Pooja Sood, Sonal Jain, Mriganka Madhukaillya, Prayas Abhinav, Stephen Wright, Renée Ridgway

‘Unspeakably More depends on what things are called than on what they are. (...) Let us not forget that in the long run it is enough to create new names and plausibilities in order to create new "things".’

In the course of thinking through our symposium on curatorship under the broad title Art after Space, our original concept has morphed into something else. The above statement is Stephen’s premise about how to incite a discussion, actually focus on having that discussion as the event, not as a secondary action to an exhibition or what has been termed the “pedagogical turn” in contemporary art.

Periferry on the Brahmaputra, Guwahati

During the past months we have been organising with Khoj this real time and online forum at n.e.w.s. Our reconnaissance trip to Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore last April enabled us to take apart the concept of Art After Space. We maintain that art’s condition is post-spatial, yet it is often frustrating to try and describe that condition with existing concepts and vocabularies. The deeper we got in our conversations – which included or even precluded the internet – the more superficial the available vocabulary seemed to be for what we were actually trying to postulate, describe, or invent.

The performative of “talking art” is something we have been recently discussing at n.e.w.s. In researching and writing our forthcoming book, Arbitrating Attention: reinvesting attention surplus in plausible artworlds as it is affectionately called, different courses of action have emerged, some inadvertently, others hammered out during our weekly Skype meetings or even real-world rendezvous. Somehow we are no longer submerged. What now comes to mind in anticipation of a weekend on the Brahmaputra at Periferry is not only the geophysical and geopolitical context – the water, the North East – but the symbolic dimension: the ferry as the meeting place, buoyancy enabling thoughts, the flux of ideas.

One of the things we at n.e.w.s. are most attentive to is the agency of the invisible-yet-undeniable, that is, the imperceptible yet sometimes incontrovertibly active presence of what, for lack of better words, we are prone to call angels, spirits or ghosts. Understandably, we’re not sure how to measure this agency, though we are convinced it is somehow graspable and that in many cases its conditions of possibility are linked to developments in art. We’re not even sure how to detect it, or what to do with it if we did. Radar and sonar were developed during World War Two in order to thwart the lethal agency of the invisible yet undeniable submarines and long-range bombers. But whatever the interest of radar aesthetics, the radar metaphor has played itself out and we now find ourselves seeking entities and energies so stealthy as to elude even radar detection. Our methodology for detecting and measuring their agency is cobbled together from a variety of sources: counter-espionage manuals, angelology, lie-detection technique, natural-language search engines, conceptual litmus testing and just basic walking around sniffing in the shadows. We call that “research” in our grant applications, presumably to give them some semblance of seriousness. The real comedy in all this is the extent to which things can be mistaken for what they actually are… In this realm, more clearly than in others, error is our guide – and in the following instance, our very example.